Ivan Doig - Work Song

Fatigue showed on Jared, but so did something like the sheen of a winning streak; Rab’s pride in him stuck out all over her. He had not backed down after the dynamiting of the Flying Dutchman pay office, simply skipped aside from any blame with the kind of remark Butte loved-even the Daily Post could not resist quoting him-to the effect that anybody who worked for Anaconda maybe should have his head examined, but no miner was dumb enough to blow up the place his wages came from. In boxing parlance, I knew, he and the union were winning the early rounds on points, with the shift stoppages he was invoking about some faulty working condition or another in the mineshafts; the danger was whether the company would be provoked into unloading a haymaker, such as a lockout or a show of force, brutal and bloody, by its goons. Well, he was the tactician and I wasn’t. I simply remarked, “On behalf of the library, I should thank you for our unprecedented number of users, lately.”

“Always glad to encourage the cause of learning,” Jared responded, wearing that droll expression somewhere between pious and piratical. “I hear you’re quite the expert on blood.” He eyed me as if curious to find any evidence to back that up.

“In a pedagogical sense,” I said, between bites of my food. “All in all, though, that is likely the wisest approach to the substance. For instance, Shakespeare invoked the word some seven hundred times in his works, but there is no evidence he ever actually experienced the shedding of blood. Christopher Marlowe, now, sadly did undergo-”

“My pupils want you back next week to talk about skulls and skeletons,” Rab sought to pin me down.

“While you’re handing out favors,” Jared was quick on the heels of that, “I could use one, too. Rab tells me you’re a whiz with figures.”

With a modest gesture I admitted to something of the sort. “Good. Anaconda has us bamboozled on the production figures.” As if scouting a battlefield, he scanned the entirety of the restaurant to make sure we were not being observed. “Show him, Rab.”

Covertly she cracked open her sizable purse to give me a peek at a vivid sheaf of papers. “Those are the pink sheets the mine managers hand in at the end of each week,” Jared went on in a low voice. “The janitor at the Hennessy Building is supposed to burn them, but he has a nephew working in the Neversweat shafts, so he slips the batch to us.” Rapidly he explained that the famously fought-over wage was tied to the Hill’s production total and subsequent price of copper, but the union was suspicious of the company’s numbers in the negotiations. “They’re playing it cute on us, we’re pretty sure. It seems like the bulk tons that come out of the mine”-he indicated Rab’s trove of pink sheets-“ought to add up to more processed tons at the smelter than the company tells us. But the differential is the problem. No two mines assay out at the same percent of copper in the ore, and there are three dozen Anaconda mines on the Hill.” Jared tugged ruefully at his lopped ear. “It’s driving us batty trying to come up with a complete figure to argue against theirs.”

“I told you Mr. Morgan would have a solution,” Rab snuggled nearer him with the scheming expression I remembered so well, “just wait and see.”

With the situation delineated to their satisfaction, the two of them, ravens of collusion, waited me out.

This, I realized with a churning in my stomach that caused me to lose interest in my meal, was another of those moments when choice was forced upon me. What was being asked of me was exactly what Sandison inveighed against, taking sides in the dogfight, as he not inaccurately characterized the Butte feud of labor and capital. Here was where a headful of learning was a burden. Intuition, instinct, some mental gremlin, whispered to me that the library’s extensive mineralogy section, complete with the annual mining reports of the state industrial board, with a bit of calculation might yield the set of ore differentials the union needed. But why should it be up to me to coax out that magic arithmetic? Unfortunately the answer kept coming back: Who else? Resist it as I tried, a certain line of reasoning insisted that the Anaconda Company had an army of bookkeepers on its side and the union deserved at least one.

Besides, around Jared Evans you felt you were made of stronger stuff than you previously imagined, and Rab’s guile was as infectious as ever.

“All right,” I sighed as she glowed in triumph, “let me see what I can do.” Jared watched keenly as she slipped me the pink sheets and I tucked them well out of sight inside my vest. “I may live to regret this, but I’ll help out in the name of the holy cause of the lost dollar.”

“Oh, we have the wage back up to where it was,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Now we need to fight to hang on to it.”

“You have the-Since when?”

“Since some Anaconda bigwig with a lick of sense looked at a calendar and realized Miners Day is almost here.” He grinned fully for the first time. “Just after the next payday.”

“It’s Butte ’s biggest doings of the year,” Rab leapt in on that. “The whole town turns out for Miners Day. You’ll have to, too, Mr. Morgan.”

My brain felt weak. “Are you telling me the Anaconda Company gave in about the dollar because a holiday is coming?”

“Look at it from their side,” Jared instructed. “Every miner in Butte will be perfectly legally parading through town that day. If you were up there on the top floor of the Hennessy Building, would you rather have them happy or ready to tear things up?”

“Then this is a kind of truce,” I wanted to make sure of what I was hearing, “of the moment?”

“That’s not a bad way of putting it,” he commended in his best sergeant manner. “The one thing sure about dealing with Anaconda is that the war is never over.”

WHATEVER LUNAR POWER Miners Day possessed that the year’s other three hundred and sixty-four did not, things settled down ahead of it. Work actions ceased and the Hill pulsed day and night with the excavation of rich copper ore. The coveted dollar a day, as Jared had said, was added back in to the wages of ten thousand temporarily soothed union men. Without the morning tide of miners, library life quieted to its usual seashell tone of whispers. Miraculously, I nearly caught up with the chores Sandison pushed my way. He himself, of course, constituted a sizable task as often as not.

This day I came back into the office after some errand to find him pacing from his desk to the window and back, his bootsteps sharp as a march beat. Barely acknowledging me with a glance, he delivered: “That robber Gardiner in New York I deal with has a fine copy of The Bride of Lammermoor. What do you think?”

Quick as a fingersnap, I calculated what a transaction of that sort would do to the delicate balance I had achieved in the library’s ledger. “Sir Walter Scott himself regarded that as one of his lesser works,” I responded breezily. “Rather like Ivanhoe, but done with a trowel.”

He grunted. “All right, I’ll think it over.” The boots retraced their route as if following dance steps imprinted on the floor. I grew uneasy as he prowled the room, more often than not a signal that something was on his mind. I could only hope no one had blabbed to him that I was staying late after the Jabberwockians and other evening groups packed up and went home, and immersing myself suspiciously deep in the mineralogy section.

Just then Miss Mitchell from the cataloguing section, young and rather pretty and somewhat of a flirt, came in with a question. I dealt with it in no time and she pranced out.